Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago)

• Lynda Dematteo (EHESS)

  “Fascism and the Mimicry of Revolution in Antonio Gramsci: From Monkey People to Social Media People”

• Mariangela Schipani (University of Calabria)

  “The ‘Two Fascisms’: Internal Contradictions of the Fascist Movement in Antonio Gramsci’s Thought”

• Boris Kliushnikov (Unaffiliated)

  “Against Fascist Appropriation of Gramsci: The Role of Art and Aesthetics”

• Henrike Bloemen (University of Münster) & Gundula Ludwig (Universität Innsbruck)

  “Consenting (Affects of) Destruction and Violence: An Analysis of Fascistization of the Present through a Queer-Feminist Gramscian Approach”

15-minute coffee break

Title TBA

One hour break for lunch and coffee

• Roberto Viviani (McGill University)

  “Aesthetics of the Interregnum: Gramsci, Benjamin, and the Organization of Political Experience”

• Thibault Biscahie (University of Montréal)

  “From Transformism to Caesarism: Emmanuel Macron, Interregnum, and the Passive Revolution of French Neoliberalism”

• Genie Kuester (Arizona State University)

  “Organizing Consent, Constraining Democratic Agency: Gramsci and Predatory Persuasion Under Platform Capitalism”

15-minute coffee break

• Alessio Frau (University of Salerno)

  “Beyond Delegation and Presence: Gramsci on Democratic Representation”

• Alexandra De Ciantis (University of California Irvine)

  “Revisiting Gramsci’s Party in Response to the Contemporary Crisis of Party Democracy”

• Natasha Piano (University of California Los Angeles)

  “Title TBA”

• John Chalcraft (London School of Economics)

  “A Democratic Process of Popular Mobilization”

15-minute break.

Title TBA

With commentary by Alastair Davidson

Closing remarks

Title: “Fascism or the Mimicry of Revolution in Antonio Gramsci: From Monkey People to Social Media People”

Panel: Fascism

Abstract: Coming soon

Title: “The ‘Two Fascisms’: Internal Contradictions of the Fascist Movement in Antonio Gramsci’s Thought”

Panel: Fascism

Abstract: This paper examines Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the internal fractures within the early Fascist movement, focusing on his distinction between «urban» and «agrarian» Fascism. The thesis of the «two fascisms» challenges the perception of Fascism as a monolithic movement, highlighting instead its heterogeneous social composition and internal contradictions. Gramsci identifies an urban component, rooted in the lower middle class and parliamentary politics led by Mussolini, and an agrarian component, represented by the «white guard» of landowners responsible for armed violence against agricultural laborers and peasants.

This distinction emerges in The Two Fascisms and Between Reality and Arbitrariness, both published in «L’Ordine Nuovo» on August 26, 1921. Gramsci interprets the fracture as a structural contradiction arising from the temporary convergence of different class interests united by their counter-revolutionary function. The Pact of Pacification with the Socialists appears as the point of greatest tension, leading him to envisage a definitive split between the parliamentary and agrarian wings.

Although this prediction was not confirmed by the subsequent reorganization of Fascism and the foundation of the National Fascist Party in November 1921, the analysis retains its significance. Its persistence in Gioda or Romanticism (1924) demonstrates the importance Gramsci attributed to the movement’s different social bases. Ultimately, his analysis reveals how apparent political cohesion may conceal divergent interests and how these conflicts can be progressively recomposed within a new political equilibrium.

Title: “Against Fascist Appropriation of Gramsci: The Role of Art and Aesthetics”

Panel: Fascism

Abstract: Coming soon

Title: “Consenting (Affects of) Destruction and Violence: An Analysis of Fascistization of the Present through a Queer-Feminist Gramscian Approach”

Panel: Fascism

Abstract: The paper starts from a key insight in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: capitalism is constitutively marked by structural crises. Translating this to the present conjuncture, we argue that contemporary fascistisation needs to be understood as a form of crisis management shaped by relations of domination. Drawing on Gramsci while extending his work through affect, feminist and queer theory, we argue that contemporary fascistisation provides affective tools for managing multiple crises. The fascistisation offers affective modes of interpretating the crises through phantasmatic promises that intensify gendered, heteronormative, classed, and racialised relations of domination and various forms of violence. However, a Gramscian perspective allows us here to still argue that the fascistisation is rooted in consent.

In the first part, we offer a close reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, focusing on common sense, to argue that his theory of hegemony can also be understood as a materialist theory of affect. The aforementioned expansion enables us to grasp the intersecting relations of domination and violence inherent in capitalism and to understand how consent is rooted not only in class relations but also in gendered, sexual, and racial relations, all of which shape common sense and affect.

The second part develops a queer-feminist Gramscian analysis of contemporary fascistisation, understanding fascistisation as rooted in consent and everyday ways of living. We argue that analyses of contemporary fascistisation must move beyond the state in a narrow sense and instead focus on its everyday manifestations as a comprehensive process of transformation within contemporary modes of living and feeling.

Title: Coming soon

Abstract: Coming soon

Title: “Aesthetics of the Interregnum: Gramsci, Benjamin, and the Organization of Political Experience”

Panel: Interregnum

Abstract: What happens to political experience when an established social order loses its capacity to organize collective life, while new forms of political organization have yet to emerge? This paper approaches Gramsci’s concept of the interregnumthrough Walter Benjamin’s reflections on modern experience, arguing that historical crises are not only crises of institutions and political authority, but also moments in which the forms through which collective experience is perceived, organized, and contested become unstable.

Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony directs attention to the cultural and political processes through which a social order becomes intelligible and reproducible as “common sense.” In moments of crisis, this organization of experience is disrupted: established meanings lose their authority, while competing forms of identification emerge. Yet the dissolution of a hegemonic order does not itself produce emancipatory alternatives. The political problem is how dispersed experiences of crisis can be transformed into organized capacities for collective action, making Gramsci’s concern with spontaneity and organization central to the possibilities opened by the interregnum.

I explore this problem through Benjamin’s engagement with the avant-garde, particularly Surrealism. His attention to disruptive images, the outmoded, and the everyday suggests that aesthetic practices can interrupt habitual structures of perception. Yet such disruption is politically ambivalent. The contrasting trajectories of Surrealism and Futurism make this clear: aesthetic experimentation could open new forms of experience, while Futurism’s celebration of technology, violence, and the masses could become compatible with the aestheticization of fascist politics.

The paper thus understands the interregnum as a contested field in which competing projects attempt to organize experiences of crisis into new forms of collective identification and action.

Title: “From Transformism to Caesarism: Emmanuel Macron, Interregnum, and the Passive Revolution of French Neoliberalism”

Panel: Interregnum

Abstract: This contribution combines Gramscian concepts and comparative historical sociology to analyze the deadlock of “Macronism” and its impact on French political economy and society. The paper analyzes Macron’s two terms as a passive revolution: a drift from transformism to Caesarism orchestrated at the state level, that has come to symbolize the impasse of authoritarian neoliberalism in France. Indeed, the political project for France implemented since 2017 is in disarray and entered its zombie phase following the failed dissolution of the National Assembly in June 2024. This prolonged interregnum, whose roots run deeper than Macron, reached its acme under his presidency and will last at least until the next presidential and legislative elections, scheduled for the spring of 2027.

The paper problematizes the initial strategic project of Emmanuel Macron as a molecular and group-specific trasformismo from the “extreme-centre”, whereby mimicking Third Way rhetorics and postures served to poach and coopt political figures from the moribund mainstream parties. The drift to Caesarism initiated with the Gilets Jaunes’ implacable repression was consummated following Macron’s failure to obtain a parliamentary majority in 2022. Resistance in the streets triggered the extension of Caesarist methods to the constitutional terrain, with sundry abuses of emergency powers to impose reforms on a reluctant parliament, and the refusal to acknowledge the Left’s first position in the July 2024 elections. This parliamentary authoritarianism entailed austerity measures, a cooptation of the far-right’s rhetoric and the demonizing of the Left, three tendencies that historically have paved the way for fascist solutions to “organic crises”, characterized as moments of widespread economic impoverishment and acute geopolitical tensions.

Title: “Organizing Consent, Constraining Democratic Agency: Gramsci and Predatory Persuasion Under Platform Capitalism”

Panel: Interregnum

Abstract: Coming soon

Title: “Beyond Delegation and Presence: Gramsci on Democratic Representation”

Panel: Democracy

Abstract: What becomes of democratic representation when democracy is understood, with Gramsci, in connection with hegemony? Starting from Gramsci’s note on “Hegemony and Democracy” (Q8 [b], §26 / G Q8, §191), this paper argues that representation cannot be reduced either to juridical delegation or to the symbolic making-visible of an absent political unity—that is, to Vertretung or Repräsentation. Rather, Gramsci allows us to rethink the relation between political representation (rappresentanza) and representation-as-expression (rappresentazione) within the hegemonic process through which subaltern groups become capable of forming a collective will, exercising political direction, and developing democratic agency.

The paper situates this problem within Gramsci’s conception of the integral State and his analysis of the crisis of modern political forms. If democracy is connected to hegemony, it cannot be understood in merely formal or institutional terms, but must involve the “molecular transition from the groups that are led to the leading group.”

Drawing on Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals and his reflections on translatability, I argue that representation becomes a process through which dispersed social forces acquire autonomous political expression. The subaltern is therefore interpreted as a specific form of invisibility: not the absence of a political unity awaiting representation, but a historically produced condition resulting from the lack of autonomous expression and political organization. Representation thus names the process through which particular interests are translated into collective and potentially universal forms, hegemonic alliances are constructed, and subaltern groups become politically visible.

Title: “Revisiting Gramsci’s Party in Response to the Contemporary Crisis of Party Democracy”

Panel: Democracy

Abstract: Amid rising authoritarianism and the capture of public institutions by unaccountable elites, political parties are widely considered to be the main culprits of democratic crisis. At the center of this “crisis of party democracy” is a breakdown in the relationship between citizens and their core institutions of popular self-rule, prompting democratic theorists to rethink the value, function, and form of parties in democracy. This article introduces Antonio Gramsci into the debate and offers an in-depth reconstruction of his early twentieth-century theory of party democracy. More specifically, it revisits his account of the party’s relationship to the democratic ideal of popular rule and places it in dialogue with two opposing yet influential alternatives: the proceduralist approach advanced by Schumpeterians and Kelsenians, and the left-populist approach advanced by agonistic democrats and plebeian republicans. Whereas these approaches accept the division between leaders and led as ineliminable, Gramsci defends the party—as a modern Prince—as the vehicle for overcoming this class division and constructing a coherent popular will. I argue that his model of party democracy offers a more promising solution to the present crisis. Resting on a reciprocal relationship between leaders and subaltern classes, it can produce a more robust form of accountable leadership and generate the direct popular participation necessary for the party to fulfill its function as an agent of popular sovereignty. By revisiting Gramsci’s mass-party model, I unearth resources for contemporary debates on party reform and propose a distinct Gramscian approach to revitalizing, rather than replacing, parties as core institutions of democracy against today’s dual threats of authoritarianism and oligarchy.

Title: Coming soon

Panel: Democracy

Abstract: Coming soon

Title: “A Democratic Process of Popular Mobilization”

Panel: Democracy

Abstract: Drawing on Gramsci, this paper aims to develop our conception of democratic popular mobilization. It is written against both Left authoritarianism and Right-wing populism. The radically democratic hegemonic strategy proposed by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) drew some inspiration from Gramsci, but arguably puts too much weight on an abstract process of politico-cultural articulation. Others have read Gramsci as a Leninist who sought not democracy, but hegemony based on the dictatorship of the proletariat (Salvadori 1979). This paper rejects these two sharply opposed interpretations. It builds on Gramsci’s writings and popular democratic readings of Gramsci (Hall 1988; Boggs 1984), to develop the meaning of an organic and democratic process of popular mobilization. Drawing on my recently published book (Chalcraft 2025), the paper situates this molecular and developmental process within the various faces and phases of the long journey from subordination to revolution. Emphasizing the originality of the living Gramscian tradition, the paper discusses the importance of civil society, organic intellectuals, popular education, the organic party, the war of position, and the formation of the social and historical bloc in the construction of a radically democratic hegemony. The paper suggests that a popular democratic reading of Gramsci could be a force for renewal on the contemporary Left.